They're, like, blurry

Barry Walters, EXAMINER STAFF CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, January 30, 1996

IT'S difficult to get a proper handle on Blur. Sure the quartet is the brainy counterpoint to the brawn of Oasis, its arch-rival in the Brit-pop sweepstakes, the Kinks to that band's Rolling Stones. Aside from two or three modern rock hits, Blur gets little radio play and sells less in America, but nevertheless can fill the Fillmore on a Monday night with remarkably young fans that know the words to nearly every tune, even the less memorable album cuts. Like so many British bands before them, Blur is massively popular in its own country and parts of Europe, yet can't get past the cult stage in America and probably never will.

Aspects of the band defy easy analysis. Like many of its antecedents (the Kinks, David Bowie, Madness), Blur likes to dabble in different musical styles, from sloppy and off-hand to fussy and highly polished. Although singer Damon Albarn has a distinctive Cockney bray, the band is strikingly chameleon-like, almost without a defining sound of its own. At a time when most recent acts burn out absurdly early with one limited sound, Blur's willingness to try things that don't always work is often refreshing. But sometimes it's simply frustrating.

The band's inconstancy affects its quality as well. Scattered across the band's four official albums and countless singles are plenty of superior tunes, the highly melodic and witty sort not often written these days in grunge-intensive America. And the band also knocks off plenty of sub-standard songs that neither live up to its potential or add anything to its sources.

But Albarn and company are cuties at a time when uglies are ruling the rock scene and the fans gathered Monday at the Fillmore were clearly happy to be in the presence of a band at least worth screaming at. Despite the fact that our modern rock radio station has taken to playing nearly nothing but second-and-third-rate Nirvana rip-offs, San Francisco remains an Anglophilic town and Blur seemed genuinely taken aback to play for an American audience that knows its songs so well.

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The band's mix of casual playfulness and studious songcraft both shaped and unraveled its live performance. Near the end of the show, when Blur played several of its best tunes ( "Stereotypes," "Girls and Boys," "This Is a Low," "Country House," "The Universal" ), the quartet achieved the greatness at which it earlier hinted.

Plagued by inferior sound and stop-and-start pacing, Blur often came across unfocused, unable to sustain a mood or groove until its finales. At the hipster end of wholesome, the bouncy crowd was clearly eager to be engaged, but its polite applause died out seconds after the end of each song.

Blur's American followers are college kids and smart teens whose earliest musical memories are of MTV spewing out shiny New Wave stars like Adam Ant and Duran Duran. Fans able to sing your every lyric are there to throw hysterical fits and that rarely happened Monday night. At times, Albarn flung himself about the stage with the appealing excess of a Morrissey, but usually he merely appeared distracted and insincere. It was hard to get a sense of how he was feeling or why he was generating so much goofy movement. His poses and leaps appeared to come from a preconceived notion of how a pop star should behave on stage, not from a burning desire to express himself or entertain.

The rest of the band was similarly unremarkable. The guitars were too loud and often drowned out the vocals. The extra keyboardist and horn players weren't properly exploited. Pauses between songs went on too long and there was little momentum until the end. Blur often behaved like the slackers it distains and not the stars it ought to become. There were flashes of charisma, but not enough to carry the weaker songs. When the tunes and energy clicked, the band justified its hype. Elsewhere, Blur was merely nice to look at. That's something, but not everything. &lt;

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